The Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG “Lost & Found” was one of the most popular releases of 2022. Releasing just in time for the holiday season, Jordan Brand produced a lot of stock to appease fans. Quality control issues (mold) and overall hype (resellers) hurt the release of this coveted AJ 1. As a result, a botched release via the SNKRS app caused thousands of users nothing but anger, sadness, and pain as they joined the “L” train again.
Due to this mishandled release, Nike restocked the “Lost & Found” April 20 via the SNKRS. The company planted the seeds for this a week prior, polling members to see how they would handle a possible restock. This gave Bots and resellers plenty of time to prepare their plans for this relaunch, again taking away pairs from the average consumer.
The restock came and went. Still, people were unsatisfied, and many members once again received an “L.” Weeks removed from this event, SNKRS VP and GM Lucy Rouse made an official statement in regards to the Lost & Found restock, saying, “We had a challenge with a third-party scaling issue, which basically prevented us from being able to handle the traffic for that particular launch.”
After unveiling a new second screen in the SNKRS app to try to prevent Bots from copping, Rouse said, "Nike has a 98 percent success rate in filtering out the bot entries, which can sometimes amount to 50 percent of total entries on a high-heat launch.” Twelve billion BOTS attempt to purchase various releases via the SNKRS app monthly. To put this in perspective, if Nike has a 98 percent Bots success rate and averages 12 billion Bot orders per month, there are still 240 million that are getting through.
As Nike continues to work on these issues and prepare for future releases via the SNKRS app, time will tell if more “W’s” go out to organic users. Our advice, take it release-by-release; things will not change overnight. As always, stay tuned to our Twitter and the Sole Retriever mobile app for your best chances at copping all the sneakers you desire on release day.
In this article
Steve Jaconetta is the Head of Content based out of Connecticut. An encyclopedia for sneaker releases, he's covered the industry for over fifteen years. His stops have included Sole Collector, Complex, and StockX, to name a few. He considers the Air Jordan 11 Concord the greatest sneaker of all time and has a strong affection for 80s pop culture. Email: steve@soleretriever.com
